NEW YORK – BostonGene and the Medical College of Wisconsin on Tuesday announced a research partnership to identify predictive biomarkers for pancreatic cancer.
Specifically, the Waltham, Massachusetts-based biomedical software firm and the Medical College of Wisconsin will analyze whether pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma patients' unique tumor microenvironments affect their treatment responses.
BostonGene will apply its large-scale analytics capabilities to interrogate exome sequencing and transcriptomics data from a cohort of pancreatic cancer patients with localized and metastatic disease. Researchers are looking for patterns in somatic alterations, gene expression, and enriched signaling pathways that might serve as biomarkers predictive of patients' clinical outcomes on various treatments. The partners hope that ultimately the predictive biomarkers identified through their collaboration will improve treatment selection for patients.
"We are pleased to collaborate with BostonGene for their sophisticated analysis of RNA-seq and exome sequencing," Ben George, Medical College of Wisconsin's chair of hematology and oncology, said in a statement. "By partnering with BostonGene we are one step closer to developing prospective, biomarker-driven clinical trials that could personalize treatment options and improve [pancreatic cancer] patient outcomes."